OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
StyleBreak: Revealing Alignment Vulnerabilities in Large Audio-Language Models via Style-Aware Audio Jailbreak
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2025
Year: 2025

Large Audio-language Models (LAMs) have recently enabled powerful speech-based interactions by coupling audio encoders with Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the security of LAMs under adversarial attacks remains underexplored, especially through audio jailbreaks that craft malicious audio prompts to bypass alignment. Existing efforts primarily rely on converting text-based attacks into speech or applying shallow signal-level perturbations, overlooking the impact of human speech's expressive variations on LAM alignment robustness. To address this gap, we propose StyleBreak, a novel style-aware audio jailbreak framework that systematically investigates how diverse human speech attributes affect LAM alignment robustness. Specifically, StyleBreak employs a two-stage style-aware transformation pipeline that perturbs both textual content and audio to control linguistic, paralinguistic, and extralinguistic attributes. Furthermore, we develop a query-adaptive policy network that automatically searches for adversarial styles to enhance the efficiency of LAM jailbreak exploration. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that LAMs exhibit critical vulnerabilities when exposed to diverse human speech attributes. Moreover, StyleBreak achieves substantial improvements in attack effectiveness and efficiency across multiple attack paradigms, highlighting the urgent need for more robust alignment in LAMs.
Where does an LLM begin computing an instruction?
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Following an instruction involves distinct sub-processes, such as reading content, reading the instruction, executing it, and producing an answer. We ask where, along the layer stack, instruction following begins, the point where reading gives way to doing. We introduce three simple datasets (Key-Value, Quote Attribution, Letter Selection) and two hop compositions of these tasks. Using activation patching on minimal-contrast prompt pairs, we measure a layer-wise flip rate that indicates when substituting selected residual activations changes the predicted answer. Across models in the Llama family, we observe an inflection point, which we term onset, where interventions that change predictions before this point become largely ineffective afterward. Multi-hop compositions show a similar onset location. These results provide a simple, replicable way to locate where instruction following begins and to compare this location across tasks and model sizes.
"As Eastern Powers, I will veto." : An Investigation of Nation-level Bias of Large Language Models in International Relations
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

This paper systematically examines nation-level biases exhibited by Large Language Models (LLMs) within the domain of International Relations (IR). Leveraging historical records from the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), we developed a bias evaluation framework comprising three distinct tests to explore nation-level bias in various LLMs, with a particular focus on the five permanent members of the UNSC. Experimental results show that, even with the general bias patterns across models (e.g., favorable biases toward the western nations, and unfavorable biases toward Russia), these still vary based on the LLM. Notably, even within the same LLM, the direction and magnitude of bias for a nation change depending on the evaluation context. This observation suggests that LLM biases are fundamentally multidimensional, varying across models and tasks. We also observe that models with stronger reasoning abilities show reduced bias and better performance. Building on this finding, we introduce a debiasing framework that improves LLMs' factual reasoning combining Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Reflexion-based self-reflection techniques. Experiments show it effectively reduces nation-level bias, and improves performance, particularly in GPT-4o-mini and LLama-3.3-70B. Our findings emphasize the need to assess nation-level bias alongside performance when applying LLMs in the IR domain.
Graph Neural Field with Spatial-Correlation Augmentation for HRTF Personalization
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2025
Year: 2025

To achieve immersive spatial audio rendering on VR/AR devices, high-quality Head-Related Transfer Functions (HRTFs) are essential. In general, HRTFs are subject-dependent and position-dependent, and their measurement is time-consuming and tedious. To address this challenge, we propose the Graph Neural Field with Spatial-Correlation Augmentation (GraphNF-SCA) for HRTF personalization, which can be used to generate individual HRTFs for unseen subjects. The GraphNF-SCA consists of three key components: an HRTF personalization (HRTF-P) module, an HRTF upsampling (HRTF-U) module, and a fine-tuning stage. In the HRTF-P module, we predict HRTFs of the target subject via the Graph Neural Network (GNN) with an encoder-decoder architecture, where the encoder extracts universal features and the decoder incorporates the target-relevant features and produces individualized HRTFs. The HRTF-U module employs another GNN to model spatial correlations across HRTFs. This module is fine-tuned using the output of the HRTF-P module, thereby enhancing the spatial consistency of the predicted HRTFs. Unlike existing methods that estimate individual HRTFs position-by-position without spatial correlation modeling, the GraphNF-SCA effectively leverages inherent spatial correlations across HRTFs to enhance the performance of HRTF personalization. Experimental results demonstrate that the GraphNF-SCA achieves state-of-the-art results.
Do Not Merge My Model! Safeguarding Open-Source LLMs Against Unauthorized Model Merging
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

Model merging has emerged as an efficient technique for expanding large language models (LLMs) by integrating specialized expert models. However, it also introduces a new threat: model merging stealing, where free-riders exploit models through unauthorized model merging. Unfortunately, existing defense mechanisms fail to provide effective protection. Specifically, we identify three critical protection properties that existing methods fail to simultaneously satisfy: (1) proactively preventing unauthorized merging; (2) ensuring compatibility with general open-source settings; (3) achieving high security with negligible performance loss. To address the above issues, we propose MergeBarrier, a plug-and-play defense that proactively prevents unauthorized merging. The core design of MergeBarrier is to disrupt the Linear Mode Connectivity (LMC) between the protected model and its homologous counterparts, thereby eliminating the low-loss path required for effective model merging. Extensive experiments show that MergeBarrier effectively prevents model merging stealing with negligible accuracy loss.
Tiny Chiplets Enabled by Packaging Scaling: Opportunities in ESD Protection and Signal Integrity
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2025
Year: 2025

The scaling of advanced packaging technologies provides abundant interconnection resources for 2.5D/3D heterogeneous integration (HI), thereby enabling the construction of larger-scale VLSI systems with higher energy efficiency in data movement. However, conventional input/output (I/O) circuitry, including electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection and signaling, introduces significant area overhead. Prior studies have identified this overhead as a major constraint in reducing chiplet size below 100 mm2. In this study, we revisit reliability requirements from the perspective of chiplet interface design. Through parasitic extraction and simulation program with integrated circuit emphasis (SPICE) simulations, we demonstrate that ESD protection and inter-chiplet signaling can be substantially simplified in future 2.5D/3D packaging technologies. Such simplification, in turn, paves the road for further chiplet miniaturization and improves the composability and reusability of tiny chiplets.
Surrogate-Based Differentiable Pipeline for Shape Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2025
Year: 2025

Gradient-based optimization of engineering designs is limited by non-differentiable components in the typical computer-aided engineering (CAE) workflow, which calculates performance metrics from design parameters. While gradient-based methods could provide noticeable speed-ups in high-dimensional design spaces, codes for meshing, physical simulations, and other common components are not differentiable even if the math or physics underneath them is. We propose replacing non-differentiable pipeline components with surrogate models which are inherently differentiable. Using a toy example of aerodynamic shape optimization, we demonstrate an end-to-end differentiable pipeline where a 3D U-Net full-field surrogate replaces both meshing and simulation steps by training it on the mapping between the signed distance field (SDF) of the shape and the fields of interest. This approach enables gradient-based shape optimization without the need for differentiable solvers, which can be useful in situations where adjoint methods are unavailable and/or hard to implement.
Faithful Summarization of Consumer Health Queries: A Cross-Lingual Framework with LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Summarizing consumer health questions (CHQs) can ease communication in healthcare, but unfaithful summaries that misrepresent medical details pose serious risks. We propose a framework that combines TextRank-based sentence extraction and medical named entity recognition with large language models (LLMs) to enhance faithfulness in medical text summarization. In our experiments, we fine-tuned the LLaMA-2-7B model on the MeQSum (English) and BanglaCHQ-Summ (Bangla) datasets, achieving consistent improvements across quality (ROUGE, BERTScore, readability) and faithfulness (SummaC, AlignScore) metrics, and outperforming zero-shot baselines and prior systems. Human evaluation further shows that over 80\% of generated summaries preserve critical medical information. These results highlight faithfulness as an essential dimension for reliable medical summarization and demonstrate the potential of our approach for safer deployment of LLMs in healthcare contexts.
Faster Algorithms for Structured Matrix Multiplication via Flip Graph Search
Venue: arXiv cs.SC 2025
Year: 2025

We give explicit low-rank bilinear non-commutative schemes for multiplying structured $n \times n$ matrices with $2 \leq n \leq 5$, which serve as building blocks for recursive algorithms with improved multiplicative factors in asymptotic complexity. Our schemes are discovered over $\mathbb{F}_2$ or $\mathbb{F}_3$ and lifted to $\mathbb{Z}$ or $\mathbb{Q}$. Using a flip graph search over tensor decompositions, we derive schemes for general, upper-triangular, lower-triangular, symmetric, and skew-symmetric inputs, as well as products of a structured matrix with its transpose. These schemes improve asymptotic constants for 13 of 15 structured formats. In particular, we obtain $4 \times 4$ rank-34 schemes for both multiplying a general matrix by its transpose and an upper-triangular matrix by a general matrix, improving the asymptotic factor from 8/13 (0.615) to 22/37 (0.595). Additionally, using $\mathbb{F}_3$ flip graphs, we discover schemes over $\mathbb{Q}$ that fundamentally require the inverse of 2, including a $2 \times 2$ symmetric-symmetric multiplication of rank 5 and a $3 \times 3$ skew-symmetric-general multiplication of rank 14 (improving upon AlphaTensor's 15).
MECHBench: A Set of Black-Box Optimization Benchmarks originated from Structural Mechanics
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2025
Year: 2025

Benchmarking is essential for developing and evaluating black-box optimization algorithms, providing a structured means to analyze their search behavior. Its effectiveness relies on carefully selected problem sets used for evaluation. To date, most established benchmark suites for black-box optimization consist of abstract or synthetic problems that only partially capture the complexities of real-world engineering applications, thereby severely limiting the insights that can be gained for application-oriented optimization scenarios and reducing their practical impact. To close this gap, we propose a new benchmarking suite that addresses it by presenting a curated set of optimization benchmarks rooted in structural mechanics. The current implemented benchmarks are derived from vehicle crashworthiness scenarios, which inherently require the use of gradient-free algorithms due to the non-smooth, highly non-linear nature of the underlying models. Within this paper, the reader will find descriptions of the physical context of each case, the corresponding optimization problem formulations, and clear guidelines on how to employ the suite.
AFLGopher: Accelerating Directed Fuzzing via Feasibility-Aware Guidance
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

Directed fuzzing is a useful testing technique that aims to efficiently reach target code sites in a program. The core of directed fuzzing is the guiding mechanism that directs the fuzzing to the specified target. A general guiding mechanism adopted in existing directed fuzzers is to calculate the control-flow distance between the current progress and the target, and use that as feedback to guide the directed fuzzing. A fundamental problem with the existing guiding mechanism is that the distance calculation is \emph{feasibility-unaware}. In this work, we propose feasibility-aware directed fuzzing named AFLGopher. Our new feasibility-aware distance calculation provides pragmatic feedback to guide directed fuzzing to reach targets efficiently. We propose new techniques to address the challenges of feasibility prediction. Our new classification method allows us to predict the feasibility of all branches based on limited traces, and our runtime feasibility-updating mechanism gradually and efficiently improves the prediction precision. We implemented AFLGopher and compared AFLGopher with state-of-the-art directed fuzzers including AFLGo, enhanced AFLGo, WindRanger, BEACON and SelectFuzz. AFLGopher is 3.76x, 2.57x, 3.30x, 2.52x and 2.86x faster than AFLGo, BEACON, WindRanger, SelectFuzz and enhanced AFLGo, respectively, in reaching targets. AFLGopher is 5.60x, 5.20x, 4.98x, 4.52x, and 5.07x faster than AFLGo, BEACON, WindRanger, SelectFuzz and enhanced AFLGo, respectively, in triggering known vulnerabilities.
STAMP: Spatial-Temporal Adapter with Multi-Head Pooling
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Time series foundation models (TSFMs) pretrained on data from multiple domains have shown strong performance on diverse modeling tasks. Various efforts have been made to develop foundation models specific to electroencephalography (EEG) data, which records brain electrical activity as time series. However, no comparative analysis of EEG-specific foundation models (EEGFMs) versus general TSFMs has been performed on EEG-specific tasks. We introduce a novel Spatial-Temporal Adapter with Multi-Head Pooling (STAMP), which leverages univariate embeddings produced by a general TSFM, implicitly models spatial-temporal characteristics of EEG data, and achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art EEGFMs. A comprehensive analysis is performed on 8 benchmark datasets of clinical tasks using EEG for classification, along with ablation studies. Our proposed adapter is lightweight in trainable parameters and flexible in the inputs it can accommodate, supporting easy modeling of EEG data using TSFMs.
A number-theoretic conjecture implying faster algorithms for polynomial factorization and integer factorization
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2025
Year: 2025

The fastest known algorithm for factoring a degree $n$ univariate polynomial over a finite field $\mathbb{F}_q$ runs in time $O(n^{3/2 + o(1)}\text{polylog } q)$, and there is a reason to believe that the $3/2$ exponent represents a ''barrier'' inherent in algorithms that employ a so-called baby-steps-giant-steps strategy. In this paper, we propose a new strategy with the potential to overcome the $3/2$ barrier. In doing so we are led to a number-theoretic conjecture, one form of which is that there are sets $S, T$ of cardinality $n^β$, consisting of positive integers of magnitude at most $\exp(n^α)$, such that every integer $i \in [n]$ divides $s-t$ for some $s \in S, t \in T$. Achieving $α+ β\le 1 + o(1)$ is trivial; we show that achieving $α, β< 1/2$ (together with an assumption that $S, T$ are structured) implies an improvement to the exponent 3/2 for univariate polynomial factorization. Achieving $α= β= 1/3$ is best-possible and would imply an exponent 4/3 algorithm for univariate polynomial factorization. Interestingly, a second consequence would be a reduction of the current-best exponent for deterministic (exponential) algorithms for factoring integers, from $1/5$ to $1/6$.
WetExplorer: Automating Wetland Greenhouse-Gas Surveys with an Autonomous Mobile Robot
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

Quantifying greenhouse-gases (GHG) in wetlands is critical for climate modeling and restoration assessment, yet manual sampling is labor-intensive, and time demanding. We present WetExplorer, an autonomous tracked robot that automates the full GHG-sampling workflow. The robot system integrates low-ground-pressure locomotion, centimeter-accurate lift placement, dual-RTK sensor fusion, obstacle avoidance planning, and deep-learning perception in a containerized ROS2 stack. Outdoor trials verified that the sensor-fusion stack maintains a mean localization error of 1.71 cm, the vision module estimates object pose with 7 mm translational and 3° rotational accuracy, while indoor trials demonstrated that the full motion-planning pipeline positions the sampling chamber within a global tolerance of 70 mm while avoiding obstacles, all without human intervention. By eliminating the manual bottleneck, WetExplorer enables high-frequency, multi-site GHG measurements and opens the door for dense, long-duration datasets in saturated wetland terrain.
A Multifaceted Analysis of Negative Bias in Large Language Models through the Lens of Parametric Knowledge
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Negative bias refers to the tendency of large language models (LLMs) to excessively generate negative responses in binary decision tasks (e.g., yes-no question answering). Previous research has focused on detecting and addressing negative attention heads that induce negative bias. However, the underlying detailed factors influencing negative bias remain underexplored. In this paper, we demonstrate that LLMs exhibit format-level negative bias, meaning the prompt format more influences their responses than the semantics of the negative response. For the fine-grained study of the negative bias, we introduce a pipeline for constructing the evaluation set, which systematically categorizes the dataset into three subsets based on the model's parametric knowledge: correct, incorrect, and insufficient relevant knowledge. Through analysis of this evaluation set, we identify a shortcut behavior in which models tend to generate negative responses when they lack sufficient knowledge to answer a yes-no question, leading to negative bias. We further examine how negative bias changes under various prompting scenarios related to parametric knowledge. We observe that providing relevant context and offering an "I don't know" option generally reduces negative bias, whereas chain-of-thought prompting tends to amplify the bias. Finally, we demonstrate that the degree of negative bias can vary depending on the type of prompt, which influences the direction of the response. Our work reveals the various factors that influence negative bias, providing critical insights for mitigating it in LLMs.
LLM enhanced graph inference for long-term disease progression modelling
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

Understanding the interactions between biomarkers among brain regions during neurodegenerative disease is essential for unravelling the mechanisms underlying disease progression. For example, pathophysiological models of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) typically describe how variables, such as regional levels of toxic proteins, interact spatiotemporally within a dynamical system driven by an underlying biological substrate, often based on brain connectivity. However, current methods grossly oversimplify the complex relationship between brain connectivity by assuming a single-modality brain connectome as the disease-spreading substrate. This leads to inaccurate predictions of pathology spread, especially during the long-term progression period. Meanhwile, other methods of learning such a graph in a purely data-driven way face the identifiability issue due to lack of proper constraint. We thus present a novel framework that uses Large Language Models (LLMs) as expert guides on the interaction of regional variables to enhance learning of disease progression from irregularly sampled longitudinal patient data. By leveraging LLMs' ability to synthesize multi-modal relationships and incorporate diverse disease-driving mechanisms, our method simultaneously optimizes 1) the construction of long-term disease trajectories from individual-level observations and 2) the biologically-constrained graph structure that captures interactions among brain regions with better identifiability. We demonstrate the new approach by estimating the pathology propagation using tau-PET imaging data from an Alzheimer's disease cohort. The new framework demonstrates superior prediction accuracy and interpretability compared to traditional approaches while revealing additional disease-driving factors beyond conventional connectivity measures.
Expert-Guided Prompting and Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Emergency Medical Service Question Answering
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in medical question answering, yet they often overlook the domain-specific expertise that professionals depend on, such as the clinical subject areas (e.g., trauma, airway) and the certification level (e.g., EMT, Paramedic). Existing approaches typically apply general-purpose prompting or retrieval strategies without leveraging this structured context, limiting performance in high-stakes settings. We address this gap with EMSQA, an 24.3K-question multiple-choice dataset spanning 10 clinical subject areas and 4 certification levels, accompanied by curated, subject area-aligned knowledge bases (40K documents and 2M tokens). Building on EMSQA, we introduce (i) Expert-CoT, a prompting strategy that conditions chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning on specific clinical subject area and certification level, and (ii) ExpertRAG, a retrieval-augmented generation pipeline that grounds responses in subject area-aligned documents and real-world patient data. Experiments on 4 LLMs show that Expert-CoT improves up to 2.05% over vanilla CoT prompting. Additionally, combining Expert-CoT with ExpertRAG yields up to a 4.59% accuracy gain over standard RAG baselines. Notably, the 32B expertise-augmented LLMs pass all the computer-adaptive EMS certification simulation exams.